Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Father's Day

So, my amazing wife sure spoiled me for father's day this year! I expected nothing less from her as she is always so good to me.

I have always enjoyed Root Beer. I think it's because my dad has a recipe for making home-made root beer and he made it quite often while I was growing up. He is, by default, "the root beer guy" in charge of bringing root beer to all the family gatherings, church activities, BBQ's, etc... I'm not going to lie, his root beer is pretty dang good. He has since passed the recipe to me and I am now able to carry on the legacy. Granted, the recipe is super simple and uses Root Beer Extract bought from the store; however, it is still tasty all the same. Some day I hope to graduate to actually brewing my own root beer from scratch but it makes me nervous because I don't want to start a hill-billy moonshine operation on accident if I do it wrong.

I'm sure this is how I would look if I were to ever start drinking the hooch. Not pretty.

So my obsession with root beer has only grown since I was a kiddo. In high school, I found the deliciousness of Henry Weinhard's Root Beer. It's an amazing draft style root beer that accompanied me to many late night high school movie nights with friends and camping trips with the scouts. Word of Caution: Drink it cold! Because it is draft style, it will spew like a boy on the tilt-o-whirl after eating nachos if you're not careful.

Then for Christmas this last year, Amanda got me some eclectic root beer bottles she found at Ace Hardware. These flavors included the following:

Jack Black's Dead Red Root Beer

Frostie's Vanilla Root Beer

and

Dang! That's Good Butterscotch Root Beer

It was fun to branch out and try different types of Root Beer and also learn more about each brewery and their history. It was a really neat gift. So it got me to thinking, "I wonder how many other root beer brands are out there."

So I Google searched it and and HOLY COW! There are hundreds of different Root Beer breweries across the country (and some international) all claiming to have the best root beer out there. It was pretty amazing and definitely overwhelming looking at all of them.

While surfing the web, I found a pretty cool website, www.beveragesdirect.com, where you can find a lot of these root beers and have them delivered directly to your door. And my favorite part? The 24-Pack Sampler! This site has probably 50-60 different kinds of root beer and the sampler pack will let you try many different flavors and brands in one case. The only two draw backs I've found with this so far is: 1.The company randomly selects the 24 root beer bottles they send you. This means you could run into repeats if you order more than one. 2.It's kind of spendy averaging out to about $2.00/bottle.

So getting back to subject, guess what Steven got for Father's Day? You betcha'! The 24-Pack Sampler!

So I've decided to start a series of blog posts (maybe this will motivate me to be more consistent with posting things) that will evaluate each root beer as I drink them. Even though I really like root beer, I'm not much of a soda drinker SO don't expect this to roll out very fast. But at least it gives me something else to talk about other than garden and politics. I've decided to try them randomly, asking Amanda to pick a number between 1-24 and counting from the back forward I tried Dad's Root Beer first.